Cook, William R. (William Robert)
Summary: Professor Cook leads you on an engaging and energetic discussion on Alexis de Tocqueville, his journey, his writing of Democracy in America and, most of all, his thoughts on the young nation he was observing. For Tocqueville, it seems, had opinions about almost everything he encountered in America, and not exclusively politics and "classical" issues such as the nature of the judiciary and the...
Format: moving image
Publisher / Publication Date: Teaching Company 2004
Copies Available at Woodmere
1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 320.973 TOCSummary: In 1911, the first newsreels flickered in America's nickelodeons. In the mid-1960s, they vanished from movie theaters as nightly television newscasts came to dominate visual journalism. In between, newsreels grew into a unique 20th-century institution that informed and entertained whole generations. In this program, Bill Moyers conducts a tour of the cultural and political landscape so...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: The outbreak of World War II saw two motion picture experts from Germany and the United States battle each other with as much ferocity as any army or navy. Their respective missions: to ignite a public desire to wage and win a global conflict. This Bill Moyers program contains an interview with Fritz Hippler, chief filmmaker for the Nazi Party. Hippler unrepentantly claims to have spoken to the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Both liberals and conservatives question the presidency of George W. Bush, from its positions on spending and education, to its launching of two wars, to its response to Hurricane Katrina. Yet the administration also accomplished something that few thought possible: keeping America safe after 9/11. Is Bush the worst president of the past 50 years, or will history reveal a more positive legacy?
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: In 1932, the United States had almost no provision by which the federal government could offer a helping hand to the victims of economic collapse. But with a staggering number of Americans out of work, soup kitchens and private charities were simply overwhelmed. Enter Franklin D. Roosevelt-a leader ready to act, armed with a New Deal for the country. Bill Moyers explores America's...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: As this Bill Moyers program makes clear, television became another member of the family in the 1960s, both reflecting and influencing the era. The times were chaotic and TV whirled us into that chaos while also holding up a mirror to it: the assassination and funeral of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the Apollo moon landing, the saga of the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: No single force has changed American politics more than television-especially the television commercial. In this program, Bill Moyers examines the phenomenon of the "30-second president" and the role of advertising in 20th-century American politics. The video features an interview with Rosser Reeves, an advertising executive who worked on early political television campaigns for Dwight D....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: In this episode, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to battle unemployment in the Great Depression, created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which spawned a “golden age” for the parks through major renovation projects. In a groundbreaking study, a young NPS biologist named George Melendez Wright discovered widespread abuses of animal habitats and pushed the service to reform its wildlife policies. Congress...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: In 1991, Rick Walker was wrongly convicted of murder and spent the next 12 years in prison. This program tells the story of his exoneration and the political struggle to secure financial compensation for him from the state of California. In addition to an interview with Walker himself, the film presents detailed conversations with key players in his case and the partisan budget battle over...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: Danger has always surrounded the coal miner's profession, but in the early years of the Colorado coal fields, it was almost as risky for a worker to stay above ground and face the wrath of the company as it was to toil in the tunnels below. This Bill Moyers program presents the memories of the people who worked those mines, freeing the rocks, metals, and minerals on which much of 20th-century...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: This Bill Moyers program features news correspondent Richard Strout, who covered Washington and the White House from 1925 to his retirement in 1984. Strout's reports, filed for the Christian Science Monitor and The New Republic, are studied here not only as chronicles of American history but as milestones circumscribing our nation's capital-and its evolution from a "small town" to the nerve...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Conventional wisdom enshrines the 1920s as the decade that roared-a time in which Americans kicked up their heels to the Charleston and went for one long joyride before the Wall Street crash of 1929. As this Bill Moyers program illustrates, those things did happen, but so did many others-not all of them fondly remembered. Nineteen Americans who lived through those years talk about their lives...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Unlike the primarily east-to-west conquest of the Americas, European incursions into sub-Saharan Africa proceeded south-to-north-an approach, climatically speaking, that did not favor the invaders. Cattle and crops failed to thrive, and indigenous diseases decimated the newcomers, yet still that vast region was subdued. How? This program tells a story of colonization and exploitation that shows...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: In 1532, 168 Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru. They were exhausted, outnumbered, and terrified, and ahead of them were camped 80,000 Incan troops. And yet within just 24 hours, more than 7,000 Inca warriors were slaughtered, the Incan emperor languished in chains, and the victorious Europeans began what would become a brutal reign that would leave its marks throughout the Americas. This...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: In Papua New Guinea, a local man asked Jared Diamond a question that penetrates to the very heart of the issue of global inequality: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [material goods], but we black people had little cargo of our own?" In this program, Diamond traces the trail of history and proposes that a society's potential for advanced development lies not in race or...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Diversity from immigration keeps cities alive, former Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ) and other leaders assert in this program; opposing views are also presented, thus summarizing America's immigration debate with mixed evaluations of its capacity for change. Using commentary from several experts-including Michael Teitelbaum, vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, and Margie...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: From medicinal shamans to taxi drivers in rusty death traps, this program plunges further into the depth and breadth of life in South America-following American adventurer Karin Muller as she travels the ancient Incan highway. Muller joins Peruvian fishermen plying their trade in handmade reed boats; watches herds of vicuna penned and sheared of their precious wool; absorbs the spectacle of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: In this program, Bill Moyers returns to his hometown of Marshall, Texas-discovering, in his words, "a new town perched on the memory of one that's gone." Today it is hoped and expected that all of Marshall's citizens, regardless of racial background, share the responsibilities of living and working in a small town. But there was a time in recent history when the opposite was assumed and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: The year 1954 can now be seen as a clarifying point of convergence in American history. Among other things, it was the year that brought the Supreme Court's decision to outlaw racial segregation in the schools of the United States. In this program, Bill Moyers, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee tell the story of how the New Deal, World War II, and postwar social changes set the stage for a long-awaited...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Karin Muller is an American on a quest to understand other cultures. This program follows her as she begins her journey of discovery along the route of the ancient Incan highway through South America. In Ecuador, she endures tear gas during a labor riot and witnesses backbreaking toil in a crude, antiquated gold mine. On the disputed border between Ecuador and Peru, she watches ordnance troops...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Globalization is uniting the people of planet Earth as political and economic forces work to create a more centralized world. Internal affairs of sovereign nations are no longer off limits to the global community, and the principle of humanitarian intervention is gaining widespread acceptance. This program documents the efforts of nongovernmental organizations such as Oxfam and the World...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: How should the news media prepare for and cope with a potential bioterrorist attack? In this Fred Friendly Seminar, Professor Michael Dorf of the Columbia University School of Law and 12 panelists role-play a hypothetical scenario that begins in a city hospital where a spike in a flu-like illness causes the ER staff to confront a chilling possibility: that it is not the flu at all, but...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Every year, at least two million people are packed in shipping containers, pulled through sewage tunnels, secreted in car chassis, and ferried across frigid waters. Among this human cargo, an alarming number end up as prostitutes, thieves, or sweatshop laborers. This Wide Angle documentary explores the worldwide boom in illicit migration and human trafficking, recording the stories of those who...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Can killers and survivors coexist in peace? That is the crucial question facing Rwanda a dozen years after the genocide that claimed the lives of approximately 800,000 people-and the subject of this multi-award-winning documentary. Using interviews with Joseph Habineza, Minister of Education and Culture; Freddy Mutanguha, director of the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center; and numerous survivors,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009